Friday, April 03, 2009

Ward Churchill won his case against the University of Colorado today as a Denver jury unanimously decided he was fired in retaliation for his controversial essay about the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The jury gave Churchill $1 for past losses, finding he was fired over protected free speech....

The four women and two men listened to the case for four weeks and heard 45 witnesses testify in the courtroom. Two male alternates were sent home after closing arguments Tuesday.

A day after the Sept. 11 attacks, Churchill wrote his essay "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens" to criticize America's economic and foreign policies. In the essay, he compared some of the victims in the World Trade Center attack to "little Eichmanns" after Nazi Adolf Eichmann, who engineered the destruction of the Jews in World War II.

CU launched an investigation to determine whether that essay was protected speech. Eventually, allegations surfaced that Churchill had committed plagiarism or academic misconduct in other writings, and another series of investigations was launched. A review of his work led to a vote by CU regents in 2007 that the tenured professor be fired.

CU counsel Patrick O'Rourke argued that the university fired Churchill solely because three committees investigated the professor over a two-year period and found he had engaged in fabrication, falsification and plagiarism in some of his writings on American Indians. O'Rourke told the jury that Churchill's termination had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 essay.

"The University of Colorado must diligently prevent misconduct," O'Rourke said during his closing argument. "That applies to every student and every faculty member to everybody who does anything in the university's name.

"You cannot plagiarize, you cannot falsify, you cannot fabricate."

Evidently you can in Colorado, and be tenured as a direct result of your academic fraud.

I will never hire a graduate from a Colorado state college or university, and neither should anyone else. There is no way anyone can have confidence in the quality of the education. In fact, as long as they have Ward "Look at me I'm pretending to be an injun!" Churchill around, I'm not sure they can be anything other than a laughingstock.

It's amazing that Colorado was able to find a jury made up entirely of people dumber than Ward Churchill.